From the very beginning of
anthropology as an academic discipline, debates about the meaning of culture
have united and divided anthropologists. Of late, the tone of this debate has
become especially strident, separating the good from the bad, the enlightened
from the ignorant. In its earlier usage culture was defined by most
anthropologists as a shared set of beliefs, customs, and ideas that held people
together in coherent groups. In recent decades, however, the notion of
coherence has come under attack by ethnosemanticists, who have discovered that
people in supposedly close-knit groups (bands of hunters, factory workers,
bureaucrats) do not share a single system of knowledge. Culture, therefore is
not something that people inherit as an undifferentiated bloc of knowledge from
their ancestors. Culture is a set of ideas, reactions, and expectations that is
constantly changing as people and groups themselves change.